Compatibility and Installation Tips

Thermalright Shaman is compatible with all contemporary graphics accelerators and even with a few discontinued ones. The following schematics may be helpful to the owners of all current graphics cards:

As for me, I have to say that new AMD Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 products will also allow using the new Thermalright Shaman cooler.

The step-by-step instructions provide a detailed description of the installation procedure. Let’s dwell on the most important steps here.

At first, you have to remove the default graphics card cooler from your card (for example, the ATI Radeon HD 5830). Then you have to install the heatsinks onto the voltage regulator circuitry components and video memory chips:

The latter is not absolutely necessary, because these heatsinks won’t do you that much good: the improvement will only be by 3-5°C at the most. Moreover, the sticky side is fairly weak, so they often come off the memory chips. As for the heatsink for the voltage regulator circuitry, we used the one from Arctic Cooling Accelero XTREME 5870, which unlike Thermalright VRM heatsinks is fastened with the screws.

According to the retention holes layout above, you should insert threaded mounts into the corresponding holes in the retention plate at the base of the cooler:

Although you don’t need any tools to install the cooler properly, we would strongly recommend to slightly tighten these mounts with pliers, because they may come out of the base when you dismount the cooler.

After that we apply a thin and even layer of thermal interface to the GPU and put the graphics card on top of the cooler standing upside down. Then on the bottom of the card we have to put rubber washers onto the mounts and top it all off with a backplate, which is fastened with the enclosed screw-nuts:

Although this plate doesn’t touch the textolite and the electronic components on it, it still has to be installed with the insulated side towards the PCB. Make sure you do it precisely like that.

Of course, it doesn’t look as monstrous as Thermalright Spitfire, but it still goes 50 mm past the top of the graphics card. As a result, the card with the cooler measures 70 mm thick:

By the way, note that the 140 mm Thermalright TY-140 fan is so big, that it not only goes past the sides of the heatsink, but also will cool the heatsink over the voltage regulator components. Here I would like to tell you that as we will see later on, this is going to become the key the success.

Thermalright Shaman blocks four PCI slots next to the graphics card, which is, honestly, very bad:

Even in our testbed where we use only one expansion card – Auzen X-Fi Home Theater HD sound card installed into the very last PCI slot – the cooler fan turned out to be only 10 mm away from the sound card.

These are the sacrifices the potential Thermalright Shaman owners will have to make. Another issue we encountered was related to our Thermaltake Twelve Hundred system case. The thing is that there are non-removable plastic retention brackets for 120 mm fans attached to one of the case side panels and when we tried to close the system case, these brackets would hit against the cooler. As a result, we simply couldn’t close the case at all, so all the benchmarks were performed with the removed case side panel.